GeraiMobile

GeraiMobile is an e-commerce platform similar to Shopify. It’s a web service for people who want to start their own online shop. GeraiMobile intend to be the Indonesian e-commerce software as a service (SAAS). It aims to be absolutely easy to use given the fact that many online seller in Indonesia doesn’t have the time to learn complicated e-commerce system. It strive for as many automation as possible, letting the machine to do the work as much as possible instead of handing it over to the people.

It has Android and Blackberry application alongside the main web application. The main web application was built with a heavily customized WordPress to support a robust multisite e-commerce solution. The mobile applications were built using PhoneGap. We develop it as a web based mobile apps (with HTML, some fancy JS and all 😉 ), PhoneGap deal with porting it as native app on Android and BlackBerry. Currently this project is still under intense testing and bugfixing.

Project Challenge

This project is done by a team of independent freelance developer. I am one of them. There were many hurdles in the middle of the project caused both by the client and also by us. Communication with the client was hard. The team itself was not so solid. We worked remotely with each other but we didn’t coordinate very well as a team. I, as one of the team member, frequently reminded the team to evaluate our way of coordination. The usage of Git was often dismissed by the team member although I kept reinforcing it. To make it worse, one of our team member was mysteriously missing. His parents were looking for him until now. He left his task unfinished. This was the state of the project when everyone (either the clients and the developers) start to feel exhausted and hopeless. It was the darkest moment of the project.

Fortunately, we didn’t stop there. We kept running albeit all the problems. With constant evaluation and continuous communication, we managed to get the project running pretty well again.